How irritating.

It just never ends. Check this, check that. Make a plan to kill a pawn, get yours killed instead. How unbelievably annoying and inconvenient.

It's embarrassing, almost. She's hardly trying at this point, and He's just scrambling. He anticipated this to a certain extent, but that doesn't mean He likes it. It's having a plan A that you know might not work, so you make the plan B while secretly hoping you'll never have to use it. It would just be so much...smoother if it happened the way it should've.

Right now, He needs to focus on the pawns. She knows the art of the unexpected, and she plays it well. He just has to focus on the pawns. Kingsley, for one, hopping around the chess board, oblivious to the fact that he is not moving himself. Kingsley, that oddly powerful pawn leader of her pawn game. He needs to make sure He gets that map before Kingsley does.

He thinks, but He just can't find a way in which the timeline works out. He won't make it in time. He might get there the day Kingsley gets the map, but not before, and the day the map is in Kingsley's possession, it's in hers.

Well, not exactly. The night he gets it, she'll take it. But not the day. Because her and her pretty ship don't much care for the daylight.

He grins, nothing around but debris and beautifully navy water to see Him do so. The moment that map is in Kingsley's possession, He'll going to rip it to shreds. She'll come to get it—at night—and find it not quite the way she wanted it. And this will all be over.

Perfect. Beautiful. It'll be an incredible move—no, scratch that.

It'll be checkmate.